Albion’s seeds in Arkansas
A few days ago The New York Times had a piece up that stirred a lot of comment, In the Land of Self-Defeat: What a fight over the local library in my hometown in rural Arkansas taught me about my neighbors’ go-it-alone mythology — and Donald Trump’s unbeatable appeal. It profiles the fight over the […]
The shadow of culture persists
A new working paper, Ancestry of the American Dream, presents some unsurprising results: Income inequality and intergenerational mobility—the degree to which (dis)advantage is passed on from parents to children—are among the defining political challenges of our time. While some scholars claim that more unequal countries exhibit a stronger persistence of income across generations, others argue […]
Three books to understand the “Dark Matter” of American History
Grand theories of history often have less utility than the claims they make for themselves. Marxism is a classic example. But that does not mean that theories of history are useless. And arguably, Marxism is a classic example in this case too. Material forces and class conflicts can’t explain all of history, but they do explain […]
Three books to understand the “Dark Matter” of American History
Grand theories of history often have less utility than the claims they make for themselves. Marxism is a classic example. But that does not mean that theories of history are useless. And arguably, Marxism is a classic example in this case too. Material forces and class conflicts can’t explain all of history, but they do explain […]
Cultural Folkways in Flux
A fascinating post over at The Crux, Votes and Vowels: A Changing Accent Shows How Language Parallels Politics. Here’s the section which I might quibble with though:
Labov points out that the residents of the Inland North have long-standing diffe…